from TED talks… Howard Rheingold talks about the coming world of collaboration, participatory media and collective action — and how Wikipedia is really an outgrowth of our natural human instinct to work as a group.
It’s a nice quick historical overview of collaboration as linked to communication and technology. At the end of course he reaches the contemporary age of open-source networks and prompting us for a wealth of the commons, as related to competition. Perhaps naîve of me, but i would rather not think like Starbucks or Apple or even Google necessarily as models for how we can “use” more open systems of information to achieve a bigger buck. Companies like those doing so is significant, of course, but allowing customer participation in the form of demanding a different fat-free milk offering (see MyStarbucksIdea), i wouldn’t exactly call an innovative open system. But on the other hand, I see my mind changing as I type, I suppose we don’t have to see competition in so aggressive of terms as smashing down the others as Rheingold references early on in his talk. Giant corporations like those trying to investigate more open ways of using and sharing information is important as to see the slowly changing mentality of openness as opposed to greater secrecy and privacy as a means to succeed in a coming-of-age post-capitalist society. It’s simply that I suppose there are lots of smaller scale, local networks that I find much more interesting and innovative in that regard (like bricolabs and many that have been posted on this list in the past).
An interesting database that Howard Rheingold began: http://www.cooperationcommons.com/
Paul Bennett: two thoughts from his Soapbox
Thoughts from design and innovation firm IDEO’s Paul Bennett, recently published in the Independent. Read the full article here.
Contribution is the new consumption
Technology has, whether we like it or not, given everyone the chance to contribute to everything – positively and negatively. Deny this at your peril. I had a client say to me recently: “One click of a mouse can take us down these days; we’d better walk the talk here.” This means that the days of creating in a void, whether it be a product or service, and then simply “selling” the outcome are officially over. The new norm involves asking people for ideas and help, and soliciting consumers to really be your partner in creating and solving your problems (and theirs).
Pie is the new slice
Trying to “own” an idea or domain is getting harder and harder to do in this age of the open-sourced, the co-created, the transparent. So why try, when there is the opportunity to collaborate with others and create something bigger (and often better) in the process? Remember when the phrase “Plays well with others” was on your school report? Time to reinstate that in business.
Look to collaborate with people who can do what you can’t (or who can do it better), share openly wherever possible, and see what happens. Look at relentlessly collaborative brands such as Philips or Wikipedia to see what I mean.
You may say: “This all sounds great, but I have targets to meet, sales to make, costs to cut.” My response is to think of yourself as having two levers to pull: your “Now” business, which is all about having the answers, about making the present make sense, keeping things going, not rocking the boat; and your “Now what?” business, which is all about looking toward the future, asking new questions, pushing the boat out. Time to get out there. Bigger fish to fry.
Collaborative Futures
“Collaboration can be so strong it forces hard boundaries. The boundaries can intentionally or unintentionally exclude the possibility to extend the collaboration. Potentially conflict can also occur at these borders.”
For this years’ Transmediale Festival, the F/LOSS Manuals project took up the challenge to write, edit and publish a collaborative publication in 5 days while test driving the alpha-release of their booki platform.
This book was written over 18-22 Jan 2010 during a Book Sprint in Berlin. 7 people (5 writers, 1 programmer and 1 facilitator) gathered to collaborate and produce a book in 5 days with no prior preparation and with the only guiding light being the title ‘Collaborative Futures’. The result is many thoughts and observations on collaborative practice, happily sticking its tongue out at the ‘pleasant social terminology’ of Web 2.0. Read more at the F/LOSS Manuals site.
All text released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.
The book can be read here.
> Download full PDF (not fully compatible with Mac OS X Preview)
> Download .epub
The distance between our minds and thoughts equals the distance between our words and mouths
BANFF Centre Thematic Residencies, No. 11
“The distance between our minds and thoughts equals the distance between our words and mouths“, led by Jan Verwoert
Program dates
September 13, 2010 – October 29, 2010
Course description
If you write one word, you can also write two. When you make many works by yourself, you can easily do some with others. Since solitude is what you treasure most, that solitude is what you like to share with those, who feel the same. At the heart of an artistic subjectivity of any depth, there is a collectivity of discordant voices. Conversely, a collective capable of free creative action, will form itself, unbound from ideologies, most likely through sharing subjectivity: in an act of sharing what cannot be shared, but only performed in a mode of synchronous asynchronicity. This is about acts, ideas and emotions that constitute community in a different manner, through enacted difference, through the motion of standing apart together.
This is the legacy of Fluxus. How do we revive it? Through composing and decomposing images or sounds, through organizing and disorganizing performances or choreographies, through putting together and ripping apart words and verses: by ourselves together with others, in studio workshops, public studies, indoors outdoors.
the power of WE
Hong Kong island, December 2009
series: collaboration
- from the series collaboration by Elo Vázquez, www.helloelo.net
the art of collaboration (UCSC)
UCSC’s Arts Division and Porter College presents
The Art of Collaboration:
Processes
Technologies
Authorship
Hosted by the Digital Arts and New Media MFA Program at the new Digital Arts Research Center (DARC), UC Santa Cruz
Thursday October 22, 4:30p-7:30p,
and Friday October 23, 9:30a-7:30p
http://danm.ucsc.edu/web/collaboration
UCSC’s Arts Division and Porter College are proud to present an interdisciplinary symposium investigating collaboration as a key concept in contemporary art and creative production.
Join more than twenty scholars, artists, filmmakers, game designers and theorists as they come together to discuss the meanings and cultural aspirations associated with collaboration, including non-hierarchical production, shared authorship, cross-disciplinary and trans-cultural approaches to research. By exploring the complexities of collaboration, this symposium challenges overdependence on intellectual individuality in favor of the non-territorial, collective, dialogic, participatory and relational.
Keynote Address:
“Enclosure Acts: Collaborative Practice in an Indian Village”
Grant Kester, Chair and Associate Professor of Art History in the Visual Arts Department at UC San Diego
Special Lecture co-presented with the UCSC Foundation Forum:
“Creativity: What I Don’t Know and What I Know”
Dr. Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar and president of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios
In three panel discussions, collaborative work will be considered as an alternative to the notion of individual authorship in intellectual and creative endeavors.
Panel participants include:
Joline Blais
Dee Hibbert-Jones
E.G. Crichton
Marsha Kinder
Sharon Daniel
John Jota Leaños
Claudia Eipeldauer of WochenKlausur
Chip Lord
Sean Fletcher & Isabel Reichert
Michael Mateas
Jennifer A. González
Susana Ruiz
Melissa Gwyn
Warren Sack
Bassam Haddad
Gustavo Vazquez
David Evan Harris
Noah Wardrip-Fruin
Jon Ippolito
The event also includes artistic presentations of collaborative works of art by students and faculty, as well as a joint reception with Sesnon Gallery (Porter College) to celebrate Full Disclosure, an exhibition featuring collaborative projects by UCSC arts and science faculty and lab researchers.
This event is free and open to the public.
Information and registration at http://danm.ucsc.edu/web/collaboration
Organized by Margaret Morse and B. Ruby Rich and coordinated by Soraya Murray, this symposium is sponsored by UCSC Arts Division, UCSC Digital Arts and New Media MFA Program, the Porter Festival Grant, the Arts Research Institute, the Academic Senate Committee on Research (COR), the Center for Art and Visual Studies (CAVS), the UC Santa Cruz Foundation and Awake Media.
the fluctuating moving back and forth of “i”
“A ball is not an ordinary object, for it is what it is only if a subject holds it. Over there, on the ground, it is nothing; it is stupid; it has no meaning, no function, and no value. Ball isn’t played alone. Those who do, those who hog the ball, are bad players and are soon excluded from the game. They are said to be selfish [personnels]. The collective game doesn’t need persons, people out for themselves. Let us consider the one who holds it. If he makes it move around him, he is awkward, a bad player. The ball isn’t there for the body; the exact contrary is true: the body is the object of the ball; the subject moves around this sun. Skill with the ball is recognized in the player who follows the ball and serves it instead of making it follow him and using it. It is the subject of the body, subject of bodies, and like a subject of subjects. Playing is nothing else but making oneself the attribute of the ball as a substance. The laws are written for it, defined relative to it, and we bend to these laws. Skill with the ball supposes a Ptolemaic revolution of which few theoreticians are capable, since they are accustomed to being subjects in a Copernican world where objects are slaves.
[..]
this quasi-object that is a marker of the subject is an astonishing constructer of intersubjectivity. we know, through it, how and when we are subjects and when and how we are no longer subjects. “we”: what does that mean? we are precisely the fluctuating moving back and forth of “i”. the “i” in the game is a token exchanged. and this passing, this network of passes, these vicariances of subjects weave the collection. i am i now, a subject, that is to say, exposed to being thrown down, exposed to falling, to being placed beneath the compact mass of the others; then you take the relay, you are substituted for “i” and become it; later on, it is he who gives it to you, his work done, his danger finished, his part of the collective constructed. the “we” is made by the bursts and occultations of the “i”. the “we” is made by passing the “i”. by exchanging the “i”. and by substitution and vicariance of the “i”.
That immediately appears easy to think about. Everyone carries his stone, and the wall is built. Everyone carries his “I,” and the “we” is built. This addition is idiotic and resembles a political speech. No. Everything happens as if, in a given group, the “I,” like the “we,” were not divisible. He has the ball, and we don’t have it any more. What must be thought about, in order to calculate the “we,” is, in fact, the passing of the ball. But it is the abandon of the “I.” Can one’s own “I” be given? There are objects to do so, quasi-objects, quasi-subjects; we don’t know whether they are beings or relations, tatters of beings or end of relations. By them, the principle of individuation can be transmitted or canget stuck. There is something there, some movement, that resembles the abandon of sovereignty. The “we” is not a sum of “I”’s, but a novelty produced by legacies, concessions, withdrawals, resignations, of the “I.” The “we” is less a set of “I”’s than the set of the sets of its transmissions. It appears brutally in drunkenness and ecstasy, both annihilations of the principle of individuation. This ecstasy is easily produced by the quasi-object whose body is slave or object. We remember how it turns around the quasi-object, how the body follows the ball and orients it. We remember the Ptolemaic revolution. It shows that we are capable of ecstasy, of difference from our equilibrium, that we can put our center outside ourselves. The quasi-object is found to have this decentering. From then on, he who holds the quasi-object has the center and governs ecstasy. The speed of passing accelerates him and causes him to exist. Participation is just that and has nothing to do with sharing, at least when it is thought of as a division of parts. Participation is the passing of the “I” by passing. It is the abandon of my individuality or my being in a quasi-object that is there only to be circulated. It is rigorously the transsubstantiation of being into relation. Being is abolished for the relation. Collective ecstasy is the abandon of the “I”’s on the tissue of relations. This moment is an extremely dangerous one. Everyone is on the edge of his or her inexistence. But the “I” as such is not suppressed. It still circulates, in and by the quasi-object.”
from michel serres, the parasite, “theory of the quasi-object”
(many thanks to sean dockray who brought up this text during his very interesting talk on quasi-architecture last week at program, and for making it available here. michalis also mentioned serres last week in the text he wrote for ap’strophe’s new release ‘objects sense objectes‘. this is also meant to be a response to this.)
kein collaboration workshop
Submitted by fls on Sun, 2006-10-08 19:21
Collaboration is one of the guiding terms of an emergent political sensibility in which certain collectivities and mutalities are being redefined as modes of affectual politics. Collaboration, literally, means working together with others, especially in an intellectual endeavour. The workshop from October 7-13, will elaborate on the actual differences that shift between the various coexisting layers of meaning and investigate the impact of a contemporary concept of collaboration — at both, theoretical and practical levels. What is at stake is the very notion of establishing a new understanding of the term ‘together’ within a dynamic of ‘working together’.
and also of note is the about of the kein community, which in certain ways, sounds very familiar (though perhaps more directly political, more clear, and more thought-out) with ours…
KEIN community has nothing in common. On the contrary, KEIN.ORG aims to bring people together who would not meet otherwise or under regular circumstances. Instead of a common ground or shared agenda KEIN.ORG is about illegitimate links, unlikely encounters, unexpected collaborations.
KEIN USERS meet on the basis of a virtual infrastructure that is built by them and not for them. There are no technicians or employees to be blamed, but there are teams of volunteering developers, administrators and operators involved who collaborate on an ad-hoc basis. The continuity and quality of service is guaranteed by KEIN users and KEIN collaborators themselves rather than by meaningless certificates.
KEIN.ORG is an open-ended and self-learning environment. It is not inhabited by unencumbered users pampered with promises and fortified by contracts. The goal is rather to deal with dependencies in the most creative ways and, on this basis, multiply experiences, skills, knowledge among those who really use and appreciate KEIN services.
KEIN.ORG collaborates with a variety of institutions, initiatives, groups and individuals from the fields of architecture, fine art, performance art and media art, antifascist activist groups, migrant self-organizations, contemporary dance and choreography, union and labor activists, pop culture, urban research, youth and education, museums and universities – just to name a few of the most obvious categories.
KEIN.ORG is currently hosting more than 500 internet domains, about 200 content management systems and countless mailinglists from 5 to 5000 subscribers, as well as numerous email-accounts.
Although we understand the need, KEIN.ORG is not the place where you can get an anonymous account. We prefer to work with users to whom we have at least a certain relationship. If you are looking for anonymous, automatic email accounts, please have a look at: http://no-log.org or http://riseup.net or related websites!
bricolabs
Bricolabs describes itself on its website as a distributed network for global and local development of generic infrastructures incrementally developed by communities. A global platform to investigate the new loop of open content, software and hardware for community applications, bringing people together with new technologies and distributed connectivity, unlike the dominant focus of IT industry on security, surveillance and monopoly of information and infrastructures.
In its decentralized and distributed final presentation (many male voices dispersed in the dark audience setting of the cinema) it felt like a journey to learn what Bricolabs had been going through over the past days. It seemed to be more of a non-definition than a definition.
As a starting point, the Bricoleurs had transformed the network image of Winter Camp into a mesh-network which they perceived more representative of their way of working. Like some other networks, Bricolabs found it problematic to define one network contact – or as Winter Camp described it, a co-ordinator – for Bricolabs it equaled to defining a leader – and in their opinion, representation of networks should be approached differently.
We don’t define Bricolabs, it would die. We describe it.
Bricolabs started and came together in a rather unplanned and spontaneous way and its final presentation mirrored that process. Its mailinglist membership is big (around 400 if I am not mistaken), and many of the Winter Camp participants and organizers are bricoleurs too.
Bricolabs is a network of autonomous actors, agents, with all sorts of organisations and groups involved. It shares a common instinct of things and methods, and not until the Winter Camp had seen a need to articulate these or clarify them. Rather than talking, Bricolabs is about doing; and who contributes to which part in this doing is not really relevant.
Back to the dispersed mystic voices in the dimly lit Studio K Cinema:
Nobody in the network needs a label, no one needs validation.
Bricolabs has no boundaries, it has a centre of gravity around which projects can happen.
Is it a network? If it is a network at all, it is an open network.
Is it a smell? What kind of smell? The smell of Palo Santo wood? Of Mandarins? The smell of home?
Is it a colour?
Who can define the future of Bricolabs?
Who can define its qualities?
Autonomy
Knowledge
Imagination
(BINGO!)
Harmony?
Empowerment?
[taken from the Bricolabs "Final Day Presentation" at Wintercamp '09]
